something stupid like i love you
by jolexfuckyes
Summary: AU in which they get drunk and try to play Monopoly and he tells her the one thing she never expected to hear. [Set in season nine, Jo never dated Peckwell.] Based on a Tumblr prompt.


**_12:07 p.m._**

"You can't take it."

Jo scoffed, stifling a giggle. "You wish. You're going _down_ , Alex."

He merely laughed at her response. Whether that meant he didn't think she could beat him in a game of Monopoly or he'd found her determination amusing, she didn't know. But he was bending down to get the remote control and that was way too off-putting for her to figure it out.

"No distractions," Alex said once he'd turned around, gesturing to the device in his right hand, and then turned off the TV. "You're going to need all the help you can get."

"Oh, suck it."

He laughed some more at this, and Jo couldn't help but smile a little too. "I'm, uh, going to ask Mer where she keeps it."

Jo nodded. "Go ahead."

She was clearly nervous, and it wasn't that she had a crush on Alex Karev; it was that she had a feeling he might be _slightly_ into her.

It probably was her own imagination – and her friends', who were the ones to place this disturbing idea in her head –, but she just couldn't shake the thought away. However, a part of her knew that it would be very weird if he had the hots for her even after all this time, so everything would be fine as long as she controlled herself and he stopped being so damn –

"She keeps saying it's on the shelf, but it's not there."

There was a moment of silence as Alex sighed and Jo waited for him to say or do something, but he was doing the same thing so no one said a word for a good minute. "Well?" she asked. "Isn't there anything we can do about it?"

He snorted. "Yang or Avery must have taken it, and we can't drive all the way there to play Monopoly. Have some class, Wilson."

Her lips twitched upwards into a smirk. "Why not?"

He opened his mouth several times to argue, but then he was left speechless, and finally he mirrored her expression. "I'll drive," he muttered.

Jo chuckled, picking up her jacket and a bottle of beer – now she was pretty sure she'd need it.

 ** _12:53 p.m._**

She was sure she was giving him a hard time keeping his eyes on the road, but the alcohol was there, tempting her to drink it, and given the circumstances, it's not like she had a choice. So she was being drunkenly annoying (or the other way around).

"But what if they're screwing? Oh, remember when Hunt felt me up? What if he's doing it to her and we walk in on _that_ but naked?"

She looked sideways and Alex was frowning, but holding in a smile. "Okay, I'm really trying here but you're making it very hard. I'm this –" he held his thumb and index finger together with his free hand, leaving a really small space between them "– close to going all the way back to the house if you don't shut up."

"Fine," she gave in. "I just –"

"We're here. Hunt's old place."

"You go in."

He rolled his eyes, but nonetheless knocked on the door. Rang the doorbell. Yelled 'Yang' or 'Cristina' four times until they both decided there was no one inside.

"What if he doesn't live here anymore?"

Realization dawned upon his eyes. "Crap."

"I'll just call her," said Jo, smiling a small smile of amusement at her own recklessness. She took her phone from her left pocket, completely ignoring Alex's qualms, and dialed Cristina's number. _This is Doctor Cristina Yang_ – "Heeyyyyyyy do you have our Monopoly?" she slurred.

\- _leave a message after the tone._

Her face fell. "Screw you."

Alex grasped her phone in desperation and hung up so his friend wouldn't get the voice message, but he took one look at Jo and burst out laughing.

"You're kind of drunk."

"Am not."

He shook his head, still grinning, and walked away from the abandoned home. She followed, giggling all the way to the car.

"Let's get alcohol. And snacks."

He just laughed, again.

 ** _1:46 a.m._**

In the end, she wanted all the cookies and all the chocolate and all the beer (and she almost got them kicked out of the supermarket), but she wound up falling asleep in the car seat.

 ** _2:22 a.m._**

At least that, and actually, pathetically, falling off the couch helped her sober up a little. She spotted a glass of ice cold water on the table that had been laid there in case she woke up anytime soon and drank it all. "Thanks for the water."

He shrugged.

Suddenly, an idea came to her head. "Can I have your phone?"

"Why do you want it?" he grumbled, but gave it to her nonetheless.

"We couldn't get to the Monopoly so we're getting the Monopoly to us."

"That doesn't make any sense."

"Watch this."

Indeed, the Monopoly app was slowly but surely downloading to his phone.

"It's tiny."

"It's better than nothing. Where is the food I picked?"

He grunted and passed her a tray with a bunch of different cookies. "I ate some of them, but I left a bit of every kind."

"That's so sweet!" She retorted with a gasp.

"Shut up."

A few minutes later, Jo was contently eating her cookies, sitting cross-legged on the couch, when he sat _right next to her_ , making direct leg contact if that was even a thing. Either way, she was sort of scared.

"Move over. We've got Monopoly."

That made more sense.

He tapped through all the unnecessary advertisements and rules until choosing to play a new game. "Dibs on the ship."

She raised her eyebrows. "Nobody wants the ship. It symbolizes how you're going to sink after I beat your bankrupt ass. I'll be the dog."

"You are such a girl."

Jo gave him a look. "I am a girl."

"Whatever." He went back to the game. "Do we begin with money or properties or should we earn them ourselves?"

"Yes money, no properties. The whole point is to fight for them."

Alex gave her a weird look. "Fair enough, I guess…" He made some more questions like that for two more minutes, and then the game began. He put the phone down in his lap and faced her. "We should roll a dice or something to decide who starts."

She nodded. "Is there a dice here though?"

His brow furrowed. "I don't think so. Let's just flip a coin –" he searched his pockets for one, but he had nothing – only the supermarket ticket, which fell to the floor. And only then she realized he spent all of his change there.

"Oh my God."

"What?"

"You paid for everything! I stood like a drunken idiot while you paid for everything! Here, let me –" but of course she had to wear leggings and a tee with no room for pockets, because she hadn't thought she'd need them when she'd thrown them on. She sighed. "Now I have to go get my wallet."

"Really, Jo, it's no big deal…" He trailed off when he saw that she'd already gone to get her money. Once she came back, he made a big show of rolling his eyes.

"How much did you pay?"

"Jo."

"Alex."

"I dunno, around fifteen dollars maybe."

She took exactly seven point fifty dollars out of her wallet and handed it to a very reluctant Alex. "Let me feel bad. Take it."

He took it, but not before complaining further. "I only paid for cookies and beer. It's nothing."

"I am not going to take my money back. It's either yours or for whoever finds it lying on the floor."

Alex sighed in defeat, and then picked up the ticket and crumpled it into a ball. The way he did it, though – quick and sudden, as though he'd just remembered he had to throw it away – was a little suspicious. _He'd given her the wrong price._

"Give me that." Despite her best efforts of taking the ticket from his hand, he managed to tear it into pieces and throw it into the trash. She stared at him open-mouthed. "I am so getting back at you for this."

"Don't make such a big deal out of it." He was right. She was being a little exaggerated, and truth be told, it was her friends' teasing and her own paranoid thoughts kicking in. "It's only a couple of dollars; I'm not going to go bankrupt because of you."

"Okay," she replied. And then she lit up, eager to change the subject. "But speaking of bankrupt, we still need that coin."

"Oh, right." He grabbed the fifty cent coin Jo had just handed him and asked, "heads or tails?"

"Tails. I'll toss it."

"No, I will."

He tried to do so, and the coin fell from his hands before he could do anything. The second time he tried, it landed on heads, but Jo crossed her arms with a squint in suspicion. "You cheated!"

"What? No, I didn't," he denied, but she was already convinced he had.

"Of course you did," she drawled, slightly amused. "I've known how to cheat in this since I was five. I can tell when somebody else does."

"Wait, so you would have cheated if I'd let you?"

She looked at him the way Meredith Grey used to look at her (needless to say, like he was an idiot). "Clearly, I would have."

"Hey!" Alex complained, but then his curiosity won him over. "How the hell do you cheat when flipping a coin?"

She smiled. "Here, I'll show you." He handed her the coin. "Say, I pick heads and you pick tails. I toss it –" she followed her own instructions and stood closer to him so he could have a better view "– and catch it midair with my right hand. Now, I lay it on my left arm, covering the coin with said hand. But here's the trick: I'm not actually covering the whole of it; I'm leaving a tiny exposed space facing me, which is small enough for you not to notice but big enough for me to be able to tell whether it landed on heads or tails. If it landed on the side I chose, I remove my hand. If it landed on tails, I quickly flip my arm to leave the coin on my right hand as though that was my plan all along."

"Impressive," he said in response as he sat back down on the couch.

"I know."

"But now there's no way of knowing who gets to go first."

She groaned. "Fine, you go first. I owe it to you after you paid for my beer anyways." She sat beside him with one leg tucked underneath and two bottles in her hands, one for her and one for Alex.

After each of them took some sips of their own bottles, he unlocked his phone and stared at it for a couple of seconds, and then cursed to himself. "Wilson. Look at this." He showed her the tiny screen.

 _Roll the dice to decide who goes first!_

"So we did all of this for nothing." Jo declared. A few seconds later, she cracked up (and he did the same). "We did all of this for nothing."

On top of that, as soon as their laughing fit ended, she picked up his phone to roll the dice but saw a blue message suddenly popping up on the screen. " _Your fifteen minute trial has ended. Monopoly for iPhone will soon be available on the App Store for $4.99!_ "

This was enough for them to start laughing at themselves again.

"I can't believe –" giggle "– we spent all this time –" giggle "– oh God!"

And once they stopped, they started drinking.

 _ **2:01 a.m.**_

"Honestly, I first thought you were a man-whore."

Alex chuckled. "And I thought you were a priss."

"Yeah, you made that pretty clear."

He took another sip of his almost-empty bottle and shifted in his seat a little uncomfortably. She felt a pang of guilt at this, but decided to ignore it. "I… did sleep around for a while, though, but not anymore." Upon saying this, he downed the rest of the bottle, and then muttered, mostly to himself, "I couldn't."

There was an awkward silence as Jo bit her lip slightly, trying to decide whether to shut up or say something that could either piss him off or lighten the mood. She really hoped the latter would happen. "There's this rumor I once heard among the nurses, and I don't know if it's true, but they said you once gave a guy syphilis."

His eyes met hers and he downed the rest of the bottle, and she couldn't restrain herself from laughing.

"Shut up." But he looked at Jo as her laugh faded down, and he actually smiled.

 ** _3:24 a.m._**

"Let's watch a movie or something."

"What movie?"

"You choose."

"Anything that's on cable, I guess."

He was now sitting on the floor with the remote control right beside him, so he turned the TV on with a swift move of his hand and Jo immediately recognized Reese Witherspoon in the TV screen.

"This movie's great," she said, and stuffed a cookie in her mouth.

"Reese Witherspoon is hot."

"And so are her boyfriends."

He scowled. "Whatever."

 ** _4:11 a.m._**

Halfway into the movie, she was lying on the couch, occasionally taking a sip of her bottle of beer, when Alex got up from the floor. She stood up and sat on one end of the couch Indian-style, and he sat on the other, leaving the remote and two bottles in the middle.

When something funny happened, they both laughed, and every once in a while he would stare at her once she wasn't looking. When nothing interesting happened at all, they'd remember they had alcohol and drink a little. When her thirty-six hour shift started taking a toll on her, Jo left everything on the coffee table and lay curled in a ball on the remaining space. And when he noticed, he let her place her head on his lap.

 _ **4:43 a.m.**_

She opened her eyes and the movie was clearly over. Some sitcom she was unfamiliar with was playing on the TV, and Alex was playing with her ponytail, and her phone had started ringing in her pocket just moments ago. She sat up quite quickly and awkwardly and read the text she'd just received.

 _From: Steph_

 _U called me?_

Jo remembered typed a quick never mind, as her head struggled to process what had happened half an hour ago. She'd fallen asleep, with her head on his lap, and he was just playing with her hair while patiently waiting to see if she woke up anytime soon.

She had to try really hard to refrain from smiling.

"You snore."

Way to kill the mood.

She turned to look at him. "Let me be."

"It's annoying."

"You're annoying."

"At least I don't snore."

"Says who?" And then he raised his eyebrows and she remembered the conversation they'd had. "Wait, I don't want to know."

He smirked.

 ** _5:00 a.m_** **.**

"If we order pizza, do you think we'll get it?"

He frowned. "It's five in the morning. Why do you even want pizza?"

"I don't."

"Okay then."

"Do you think we'll remember all of this in the morning?"

"I hope we don't."

"I don't."

 ** _5:09 a.m._**

"Maybe we should make coffee."

"Or maybe we should sleep."

"Sleep is for the weak."

"How drunk are you?"

 _ **5:15 a.m.**_

Jo was lying on the floor. He'd insisted on sleeping on the couch and letting her sleep on his bed, and he was peacefully sleeping with one hand hanging besides him and she was lying on the floor next to him, thinking of the way he smiled when she laughed and the way he laughed when she smiled and his hands in her hair.

"Alex."

No response.

"Do you like me?"

 ** _5:18 a.m._**

"Jo."

"..."

"I love you."

 ** _10:33 a.m_** _._

They both had the day off, and Jo had a hangover and she was still a little drunk, so going to work wasn't an option.

Last night was a blur. There was nothing she could remember too well, but she could recall Alex saying the words she'd never thought she'd hear from him. But it had to be a dream.

She didn't believe he would (or could) love her. Maybe it was her insecurity speaking. Or maybe it was that she didn't dare to think of the possibility that she could love him back.

So she drank two glasses of water and made herself breakfast. And even though she'd promised herself she wouldn't, she sauntered into the living room and there he was – lying on the couch, with one hand tucked underneath a pillow and the other one hanging by his side.

 **a/n: clearly i am underage and have yet to get really drunk but i needed jo and alex to be allowed a little honestly and recklessness so sorry if i did a shitty job at getting them kind of drunk. this is my first ga fanfic anyways so yeah. a review is always appreciated :)**


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